A Model of Cyber Extremists' Rhetorical Structure Towards Protecting Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

Much research at present focuses on the ways in which organizations secure their networks and information in the supply chain, ignoring the ways in which organizations construct and understand the core of the cybersecurity risks. Cybersecurity focuses more on defense mechanisms such as anti-virus software, malware protection, firewall and more on securing network and application. More research to understand extremist activity should be conducted by exploring the extremist corpus. It is a good strategy since the web is overloaded with multiple conversations or information since the dependency to the technology has been skyrocketing by people including by the extremist itself. The objectives of this study were to identify the types of rhetoric in cyber extremist’s communication, analyze how the cyber extremists utilized the rhetoric in appealing to the audience, identify the stylistic devices used by the extremists and produce a model of cyber extremists’ rhetorical structure. Therefore, new approaches to study the rhetoric of cyber extremists have been designed. It is the combination of Norreklit’s methodology, Neo-Aristotelian criticism ideologist criticism which were deemed able to pry out the hidden literacy of the extremists. In this study the type of rhetoric that dominated the cyber extremists’ communication was pathos. The category of pathos in the extremists’ postings was more on negative feelings such as sad, anger and hatred. Using the Neo-Aristotle criticism, the stylistic devices used by the extremists were identified such as the metonymy, simile metaphor. The metonymy used was like ‘Jihad’, ‘Mujahidin’, ‘Ansar’ and ‘Muhajirin’. The metonymy ‘Penyembah’ which referred to the opponents’ obsessive materialistic behavior was seen multiplicatively in the extremists’ postings. The simile stylistic devices such as the word ‘Thagut’ and ‘terrorist’ were used by the extremists as direct comparison. As a direct comparison, Meanwhile, the metaphor of death was used consistently by the extremist which can be seen as a scary technique for the opponents. Meanwhile, by using the ideologist criticism, the appearance that was used by most of the extremists was the desire to be seen as a peace ideologist and kind rhetor through the use of cold color such as blue and green with the nature design as the background of the blog. All the phrases were gathered, analyzed and integrated to ascertain the pattern based on the research methodologies to develop a model. A model of cyber extremists' rhetorical structure was developed and established towards protecting the critical infrastructure to ease any parties including the authority, expert and public to identify the possible extremists’ styles as red flags during cyber communication such as social media communication.